Cultural and Acultural Foundations: Surveying the “Question of Foundations” through Engelhardt, Wittgenstein, and St. Gregory Palamas

The question of the foundations of religion and medicine in a post-Enlightenment world is fraught with a number of temptations. With Kant, the temptation is to seek foundations in a transcendental reality; with Hegel, the temptation is to seek foundations in a social dialectic; with Nietzsche, the tendency is to seek foundations in a triumph of the enduring will. Navigating amidst these rival foundations is no small challenge, but as Charles Taylor suggests, perhaps the greatest temptation is to approach these foundations as simple “differences in belief.” Especially with ancient philosophy, it is a great error to see other ages “having the same doctrinal repository as ours, but just opting differently within it.” Phrased differently, the modern/post-modern mind is defined by its own struggle to grasp other embodied understandings and social imaginaries outside itself. In short, the modern mind is “acultural” in the sense that it assumes a neutrality and univocity of possible beliefs.

As a way to engage this puzzle of modern/post-modern self-consciousness, this presentation briefly considers Engelhardt and Wittgenstein as two figures who engage foundational thinking from within the logic of modernity. Engelhardt examines the modern foundations of bioethics through the “principle of permission” as a way to show how “lamentably thin” medical ethics are today. In a similar way, Wittgenstein examines the possibilities with logic and language to show how “little has been done” when these rational games near perfection. Moreover, motivating both philosophers’ critiques is an explicit “therapeutic aim” that gestures towards a greater mystery and transcendent reality.

Moreover, neither Wittgenstein or Engelhardt seek transcendent reality apart from commitments to embodiment and pre-modern, “cultural thinking”. As they work within this acultural era, both figures are more in line with ancient modes of thinking and being, and in this way they both support the embodied (hypostatic) anthropology of St. Gregory Palamas that is particularly relevant to medical care for the body. Here St. Gregory articulates a foundational anthropology that particularly contests dualism. “What pain or join or movement of the body is there, which is not shared by souls and body? In the same way as the Divinity of the Word Incarnate is common to soul and body…so, in spiritual men, is the grace of the Spirit transmitted to the body by the soul as intermediary…” In short, St. Gregory Palamas’ hypostatic anthropology demonstrates modernity’s inability to escape what Taylor calls the “homogeneity of kernel truths”. Whereas modernity justifies “truth” and “science” within the assumption that enlightened humans will “come to see” the truth—lumping “kernel truths about human life into the same package”—St. Gregory enacts an entirely different foundation grounded in the Person of Christ. Ironically, from within their postmodern games of language and bioethical principles, Wittgenstein and Engelhard may both be seen prophetically gesturing towards St. Gregory’s Christology.